Battlecursed (PC) Preview

First-person dungeon crawling games have become immensely popular as of late, typified by the likes of the Etrian Odyssey series. They generally have strategy and planning on the forefront. Action RPGs, in contrast, tend to award skills or agility more than strategy, so a mix of these two goes in a rare direction, if nothing else. In Battlecursed, leading a group of four adventurers in an endless dungeon, the player must try to fight their way out. Cubed3 takes an early look at the game.

Battlecursed is currently in a very early alpha stage, so there are a lot of unknowns at this time how the final product will be. As of right now, the game primarily centres round a first-person dungeon crawl through randomly created dungeon floors. The monsters will hobble around, and players must aim their cursor, activate various skills, and kill the horde coming at them. It is a little like playing a fantasy version of Goldeneye.

There is a steep, but short, learning curve, realising what exactly the attacks are, and why there are four characters, because the system is kind of unique. Essentially, those in control represent four of these adventurers, ranging from knights to mages. Any time they are attacked, the damage randomly goes to one of these four.

Likewise, attacking uses one of these four but the player controls what character is currently 'active.' Each one has two moves, usually a regular attack and a stronger attack. Therefore, an archer might have a normal shot, and the second move might be a power shot; a mage would be a small spell and a bigger AoE. A typical move will usually have about ten seconds of cool down.

What this means, though, is the best 'strategy' simply revolves around switching the main character and spamming moves, leaving little thought to actual planning or what anyone is doing. At this stage, equipment, levels, skills or anything along those lines are not implemented, so it is tough to tell how it will ultimately fit into the picture. Done correctly, the game has some pretty high potential if the problem of simply spamming being the best option is fixed.

Final Thoughts

The current state of Battlecursed is very early alpha (although the game has been in development for at least a year) and is tough to extrapolate completely. At times the game shows promise of being a pretty fun RPG romp, but at others it could easily fall into a spamming, repetitive mess.